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Instant File Recovery from Cloud using Azure Backup

Since its inception, Azure Backup has empowered enterprises to embark on the digital transformation to cloud by providing a cloud-first approach to backup enterprise data both on-premises and in the cloud. Today, we are excited to go beyond providing Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and introduce Restore-as-a-Service (RaaS) in the form of Azure Backup instant restore!

With Instant Restore, you can restore files and folders instantly from cloud based recovery points without provisioning any additional infrastructure, and at no additional cost. Instant Restore provides a writeable snapshot of a recovery point that you can quickly mount as one or more iSCSI based recovery volumes. Once the snapshot is mounted, you can browse through it and recover items by simply copying them from the recovery volumes to a destination of your choice.

Value proposition

One restore mechanism for all backup sources - The Restore-as-a-Service model of Azure Backup unifies the approach for recovering individual files and folders backed up from sources in the cloud or on-premises. You can use instant restore, whether you are backing up on-premises data to cloud using Azure Backup agent or protecting Azure VMs using Azure VM backup.

Instant recovery of files - Instantly recover files from the cloud backups of Azure VMs or on-premises file-servers. Whether it’s a case of accidental file deletion or simply validating the backup, instant restore drastically reduces the time taken to recover your first file.

Open and review files in the recovery volumes before restoring them - Our Restore-as-a-Service approach allows you to open application files such as SQL, Oracle directly from cloud recovery point snapshots as if they are present locally, without having to restore them, and attach them to live application instances.

Recover any combination of files to any target - Since Azure Backup provides the entire snapshot of the recovery point and relies on copy of items for recovery, you can restore multiple files from multiple folders to a local server or even to a network-share of your choice.

Availability

Azure Backup Instant Recovery of files is available in preview for customers of Azure Backup agent and Azure VM backup (Windows VMs).

Learn how to instantly recover files using Azure Backup Agent

Watch the video below to start using Instant Restore for recovering files backed up with Azure Backup Agent for files and folders.

The supported regions for this preview are available for review and will be updated as new regions are included in the preview.

Visit this document to know more about how to instantly recover files from Windows Azure VM backups.

The instant file restore capability will be available soon for users who are protecting their Linux VMs using Azure VM backup. If you are interested in being an early adopter and provide valuable feedback, please let us know at linuxazurebackupteam@service.microsoft.com. Watch the video below to know more.